Ziplist Users Can Use EasyRecipe Plus – Seamlessly – no converting

We’ve all heard the drama where food bloggers who use the Ziplist recipe plugin are blocked from adding new posts until the developer finds a fix for the new WordPress 3.9 software update. Over coffee the other night, John said, “I think I could probably tweak EasyRecipe Plus to read those recipes so they wouldn’t have to do a thing.”

“Wow, that would be helpful for a lot of people, especially those wanting to convert their recipes over,” I said.

He smiled and gave me the standard, “Yep!”

So he went to work and at about 2am on Easter Sunday morning he got it all sorted and tested the best he could. With so many versions of browser software, WordPress software and themes, nothing is ever going to be perfect in the blogging world, but… most Ziplist users with WordPress 3.9 (or any other version) should have no difficulty at all in installing EasyRecipe Plus and switching over with nothing to do.

EasyRecipe didn’t suffer the same fate because John downloaded the WordPress 3.9 beta and saw all the changes and worked for two weeks to get the software updated in time. Even then, he finished only hours before the WP release.

We’ve only had one negative comment about it so far. It was something about John being a greedy bastard because he only put it out in the EasyRecipe Plus plugin and not the free version. To that we say, “Fine, don’t use it.” Yes, it costs $24.95 for EasyRecipe Plus. Working for nothing to create a top quality plugin and then having to work hours for free sorting out theme problems gets old fast. It’s also difficult to eat when you work for nothing.

How does it work? You will be surprised at how easy. Install EasyRecipe Plus, activate it and then deactivate Ziplist. BAM. Your recipes will work just fine now. You can add new recipes or use any of the EasyRecipe Plus features. Here’s a quick video (done at 1am) showing how it works.

Don’t forget that EasyRecipe Plus also works with Ziplist so your recipe boxes will work too.

I didn’t want to fuss with the google formatting that they require to get noticed and I didn’t like the plugins on offer (at that time it was fill in a box for amount, another box for measurement, another box for ingredient and another box for a new line – Calgon take me away!) So I asked John to write one for me. I liked it a lot. 🙂

Maureen, John is seriously amazing. It was worth the cost to upgrade when I did it before, but knowing now what changes have been made, this is by far still my favorite plugin and I know how hard he works. I’ve had the opportunity to have him work on my site trying to figure something out for me (last year) and he worked tirelessly and endlessly and got no more payment than the cost of the plugin. Please let him know how grateful many of us are to have such an awesome plugin! We DO appreciate what he does.

I wanted to concentrate on my writing and cooking and photography – things I enjoy, not geeky things. So the software does the heavy lifting and Google organic search is by far my biggest referrer. by 3 or 4 times.

I’m no geek but from all the conversation that I paid any attention to at all, WordPress changed its editor and libraries. It warned plugin developers to ignore their warnings at their peril. So it’s no surprise really, those who ignored it are now suffering.

You should be fine. You don’t use a plugin for formatting so it won’t affect you at all. Maybe you’re using other plugins that might but you can disable them one by one until you find the culprit.

I never update to the newest until a week or so after the event (or even longer if there are issues). I work too hard on my blog to have it out of commission.

That’s so good of John to put in all that time and effort. He’s a very clever man and as his age, I don’t know how he copes with working until the wee hours. It’s so disappointing to hear that someone thinks people of your skills are on this Earth to provide a free service for everyone else. There is a scripture in the Bible that says, ‘The labourer is worthy of his wages’. Your John is worthy! I haven’t bought EasyRecipe yet but I will over this Easter break – I definitely need to give my readers the ability to print recipes. Happy Easter, Maureen xx

I love easy Recipe it is unbeatable. I am also extremely happy to pay for it. Is it because I know that questions get answered quickly?. You bet. Thanks for all the work ( John).I usually don’t update to a newer version for weeks but this one kept coming up in my emails. i figured it must be a security update due to the Bleeding heart security breach of 2 weeks ago so updated this morning only to find all of my widgets disappear. i have spent precious time this morning reinstating. I hope there are no other problems. Maureen, Happy Easter and all the best, I think of you all of the time ( you are one of my most favourite bloggers x)

Goodness!This upgrade really messed with me and my brain. I just sent a support ticket to help me figure out how to get the Recipe Plus plug in to work like it was. I’ll give the deactivate zip list a try in the morning!

So good of you guys to do this. And like a lot of people are already saying it is really worth every penny… I love the plugin and it’s ease of use!
I’m soon moving to a new design with a custom build recipe template but easy recipe will always be my first love… 🙂

Well I’ve totally stuffed up the upgrade to 3.9 and now every post is empty when I go into it! Head is firmly in the sand and I’m trying to ignore it hoping it will all magically reappear – or my friendly IT guru comes back from his Easter break and fixes it for me. Hopefully the latter. Until then I’m taking a break!!
Can’t believe someone took the time to write a snarky email complaining about the plugin. Nothing as strange/mean as folk…..

I’ve been hearing about some of the difficulties with the update and zip list plug in – ironically, I almost started using it about 3 weeks ago, but changed my mind and easy recipe seems to work for me – you and john are so dedicated to put this work around togther! Thanks Maureen!

I love Easy Recipe and $25 is such a reasonably low fee to pay for what you are getting! Tell John thanks for all this work! I had no idea others were experiencing problems with Ziplist – I’m sure it’s frustrating. Good to know there’s an easy fix.

I haven’t updated to 3.9 yet and, hopefully, WP won’t do it for me (which they have been lately for some reason). But I have Easy Recipe Plus standing by just in case 🙂 You’re so lucky to have an in-house techie!

I’m a former Ziplist user (still no fix for that plugin today) who downloaded Easy Recipe Plus on Sunday so that I could post and edit in WordPress 3.9. Totally worth the $25. Not only did it fix my issues with Ziplist, my recipes look better than they did before. Thank you so much!

I wish I had come by and read your post earlier. I updated the wordpress on my blog and BOOM! I could see nothing on Ziplist. Then I had to bat my eyelashes at the better half to go figure out what I did. He did fix the thing, but he suggested I switch to Easy Recipes Plus. Now I can tell him, I sorta know the girl who knows the guy who made the Easy Recipes !! 😀

I’ve used EasyRecipePlus from the beginning, because I’m happy to support members of the food blog community. I had a problem this weekend and was so delighted to get a speedy response to my support ticket on a Saturday. I love your product and it was worth every penny. Giving you both a virtual high five right now!

Your husband is THE MAN!! Wow, little did we know what was going on behind the scenes. Please thank him heartily. cook him a wonderful dinner, rub his back, whisper sweet nothings in his ear, ………. treat him very special from all of us who LOVE Easy Recipe, it’s the best!!

Your post makes me feel like I have been living on another planet. I had no know idea about the zip list or the plug-in thing. (I am pathetically retarded when it comes to anything to do with computers!) I am so glad you did a post on this.

This comment was a bit of a surprise but then John looked at your site and you didn’t upgrade to WordPress 3.9 so you didn’t experience the past 5 days of your blog not working. 🙂 I wouldn’t upgrade just yet as some people are still struggling with Ziplist.

It was annoying enough to come home from surgery and have to do a WP update, but this whole Ziplist thing has been a pain I didn’t need right now. Been wanting to switch over to Easy Recipe for a while, guess this is the push I needed. Thanks for all your hard work on this, John, and for making it a priority as it is not a small issue for food bloggers — none of us want to work for free, good work deserves good pay.

I went to implement one of these add ons with my blog a few years back but once I changed my web designer, they wouldn’t work. More trouble than it was worth. I will look into this one though, Great tutorial Maureen!

Theme designers who can’t make a theme work with standard plugins are a real worry. When the dust settles, email me and tell me what happens when you add plugins and the brains trust might be able to sort that out for you. Formatted for Google recipes do get more hits.

I guess I am a terrible blogger because I don’t use wordpress.org…just not techy enough so I use .com instead with no plugins. 🙁 I think it is wonderful that your John has developed something that can help so many people…I’m sure everyone is very grateful.

Thanks so much for this info. If I can’t get Ziplist working by tomorrow, you have another customer! Do you know if all the formatting I did to make my Ziplist recipes look the way they do (colours, font size etc) will disappear if I do switch?

What an amazing idea Maureen, I totally agree that working for nothing is not worth it. I haven’t had a chance to review the plug in but I will and as soon as I have some serious money (OK, any money) rolling in, I’ll definitely purchase it. I’ve always thought that my recipes could use more consistency and I would “love a print” version too.

Hi, Maureen (and most amazing John)! We just wanted to add our voices to the chorus singing your praises and the praises of EasyRecipe Plus! We’ve been running Easy Recipe Plus for about a year now (ever since we launched our blog) and love, love, love it! We were also simultaneously running ZipList so that users who wanted to use the ZipList recipe box could do so (not sure anyone actually does that, though). We were, however, very concerned about the stranglehold ZipList would have on our recipe content, and for that very reason have always added recipes via EasyRecipe. With the recent ZipList/WP 3.9 crisis, we were oh-so-relieved that we’d been safely in the hands of EasyRecipe Plus from the very start. When we took the leap and turned ZipList off altogether, EasyRecipe swooped right in without ever missing a beat (just as you promised it would). Our recipes are safe and look just as awesome as they did before. We were so relieved! EasyRecipe Plus has always been worth every single penny we paid, and John absolutely proved this to us again during the WP 3.9 events of the last week. Maureen – please give John a giant hug from both of us and tell him we think he is a total rock star. And to anyone else reading this – we can’t recommend EasyRecipe Plus highly enough – it is 100% worth the purchase price!

Oh Maureen, I didn’t see this post when we were talking (and that video would have helped me that time! Ugh!) as we were busy with house guests.

Honestly, I cannot thank John enough. This conversion has been SO helpful, especially the step-by-step pictures and all the hyperlinks… It would have taken me MONTHS or YEARS to redo my recipes, but thanks to John, it was done by just one (or few) clicks. You can’t get everything for free, and he works SO hard that this one time cost to get ER is NOTHING!

That’s excellent news. I use Easy Recipe Plus but have older recipes with Ziplist and can’t deactivate it or the recipes disappear completely. I must give it a go now. The less plugins installed the better. Your employee, John, was very smart to be ahead of the update. LOL.

I’m SO glad I didn’t make the 3.9 upgrade yet! I’ve had EasyRecipePlus for some time now and love it–it’s well worth spending a little $$ to get such a top-notch plugin, especially given the recipes are the main part of the blog!

We’ve upgraded our test servers but I’ll hold my hand up and say I haven’t updated orgasmicchef.com just yet. Not until all the kinks are out and all the plugin developers have made their changes. We think alike, Anne!

I don’t use EAsy Recipes nor Ziplist. Am I missing something here? I tried the free version of Easy Recipe once, but found it too limiting and was too cheap to buy the pro version. 🙂 What is the advantage of using a recipe plugin? What am I missing? Must be very nice to have a programmer in the house. Good for you John!

Mauren, I was salivating over the Easy recipe plus, and thinking of switching from Ziplist as it looks more fun, until I saw the video demo..then I saw your blog name..and me being such a tubelight, only realised that it’s Maureen’s John’s awesome plugin..so i am DEFINITELY buying the pro version now :-)..
One as I love the plugin, and second, as a friend’s support! By the way one question, do I have to transfer each recipe manually from Ziplist?

I just purchased ER Plus a couple of days ago after testing the free version. All I can say is I don’t know why I waited so long to use this plugin. It’s fantastic and should streamline my workflow, give consistency in my display and print formats and take the labour out of manually microformatting recipes.

Some great features and so glad I gave it a try!! I’m looking forward to converting all my recipes (that’s going to be a project!). Thank you, Maureen and a big thank you to your husband, John, for a well thought out plugin that is of such great value for so many people!